Ephemera from Iraq War Article

Last week, I turned in an article on the Iraq War. There were some major sections that I cut – they didn’t fit and distracted from the main argument. They’re interesting enough to share, however, so here they are.

(Snippet 1)

While the primary strategy was to oppose the Iraq War through speech, it is sight that has come to dominate how most people experience war. On a basic physiological level, the direct experience of violence – such as shooting bullets that rip into someone’s body and spilling their blood, or cleaning up someone’s splattered guts after the scene – will rountiely overload the mind and result in trauma. Direct experience is not common, however, as most people experience through visual technologies. The twenty-four hour news cycle feeds war to the people by playing stock footage featuring political officials giving press conferences, missiles sailing through the air, and military personnel on the move. The result is that the body gets trained to experience war as if every organ was an eye. War in such a media environment becomes structured by the characteristics of what Lacan calls “the scopic field.”